indeed we saw with hurricane sandy what happens when a major piece of critical infrastructure like your electricity grid goes down for a prolonged period. and our cyber infrastructure, our cyber networks, are ripe for those types of attacks. >> reporter: janet napolitano by the way is a member of the council on foreign relations. this attack was apparently detected relatively quickly but, jon, it may underscore the vulnerability a lot of computer networks face in this country. jon: well, so the website is working and it was, as you say, it was discovered fairly early. how does it work? what did they do? what did they accomplish? >> reporter: you described this as a drive-by attack. the idea wasn't really so much to target the website so much as the people that use it. we talk about high-profile membership within the council on foreign relations. you're talking about former presidents. even current defense and intelligence officials that mavis it this site on a regular basis the idea here for hackers was to kind of get into this website and then get into the systems of people that visite